Inspired by the founder of Impressionism, the artist with a passion for gardening, Claude Monet, the renowned Belle Époque French actress Madame Thébault decided to create a garden, planting the first tree in 1903. A local landscape gardener Auguste Lecanu helped Madame Thébault to deal with practicalities and make her dream garden a reality. However, it is to Claude Monet that the garden owes its ambience which has been carefully preserved until the present day.

The garden sprawls across the cliffs of the Alabaster Coast (Côte d’Albâtre), a natural wonder of Normandy. Deep in the garden lays hidden the old villa Roxelane named after Madame Thébault’s favourite heroine. This historical figure eclipsed the fame of her husband, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, through her courage and devoted love. Roxelana’s extraordinary life has become the source for innumerable literary works, films and theatre plays.

The actress tenderly loved her vast collection of orchids. To her, they personified the concubines of the Sultan Suleiman’s harem. This helped her to get into character while rehearsing the role of her heroine Roxelana. It was exactly the role that brought Madame Thébault great success and catapulted her to the heights of stage and silver-screen stardom. Today, the orchids of Les Jardins d’Étretat commemorate the creativity of the garden’s historical foundress.

The main terrace of Les Jardins d’Étretat sits on the famous cliff d’Amont. Claude Monet spent many long hours at this unique place working on his canvases – a series of paintings and sketches based on ‘Les Falaises d’Étretat’. In artist’s own words, “the cliffs here are like nowhere else“. The connoisseurs of beauty from across the globe arrive here searching for inspiration. This terrace is a magnet for artists, garden aficionados, nature, architecture and art lovers, especially the admirers and followers of Claude Monet. Visitors to Normandy find their impassioned thoughts, moods and feelings echoed in the eternal beauty of the scenery, as they delight in the surrounding landscape views and myriad of colours of the Étretat cliffs.

The dominant architectural trends we are witnessing today are geared towards reviving optimism and restoring faith in a better, more ecologically aware future of our planet, where technology and cutting-age scientific advancements will serve for the benefit of the humankind and the natural world. The neo-futurism of the 21st century (such is the name given to the leading artistic movement of our time) is essentially different from all previous movements in its evolutionary approach. It closely follows technological developments in a variety of fields, including art and architecture.

This avant-garde movement of the late 20th – early 21st century was the brainchild of the urbanist architects proclaiming that everyday human activities should comfortably run in a user- oriented infrastructure, which should take precedence over any other considerations. This movement is grounded in the principles of expediency, minimalism, sustainability, ethics and technological efficiency. Its leading representatives are the architects Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Santiago Calatrava and the designer Vito di Bari.

The principles of neo-futurism have rapidly spread across a variety of artistic disciplines, including sculpture, architecture, machine building, fashion industry, film, and even literature. The burgeoning popularity of this movement has been spurred on by technological advancements and innovations, which have created a host of potential opportunities for turning neo- futuristic ideas into reality. However, these elements evolve at a much slower pace in the field of the garden and landscape design due to the fragility of live plants – the biggest challenge faced by designers who wish to create grandiose sculptural plant compositions. To them, trimmed plants are new architectural material for spatial arrangement of the gardens of the future.

In 2007, the designer and architect Vito di Bari published ‘The Neo-Futuristic City Manifesto,’ which was subsequently submitted by the Milan team applying to host Expo 2015. Di Bari defined his neo-futuristic vision as “a cross-pollination of art, cutting-edge technologies, and ethical values, combined to create a pervasively higher quality of life.”

第一个基于新未来主义理念的开放性实验花园

Les Jardins d’Étretat is the First Public Experimental Garden Based on Neo-Futuristic Ideas as the Garden of the Future.

Alexandre Grivko reconceptualised and restructured the garden in 2015. The historical plant collection was restored and Les Jardins d’Étretat continued enriching themselves with new imagery, as its boundaries expanded. The merit of this project lied in a harmonious coexistence of the old historical garden with contemporary architectural aesthetic ideas, eventually resulting in a neo-futuristic vision of the garden.

Les Jardins d’Étretat were created following the designer’s own method that allowed him to grow a garden that appears at least half a century old within just two years. To achieve this goal, the architect drew from the methodology of André Le Nôtre, the historically acclaimed French landscape and gardening artist, and the master-creator of gardens and parks at Versailles. As he set to complete his work at Versailles in record time, Le Nôtre limited himself only to a few plant species, thus, achieving a striking visual effect through expressively trimmed plant compositions. Having rediscovered and reinvented the mastery of André Le Nôtre, the signature style of Alexandre Grivko has reached new heights in Les Jardins d’Étretat. In setting up the garden, Grivko relied on the artistic philosophy of Le Nôtre, which prompted him to arrange the space through sculpted large- scale plant compositions.

The gardens feature over 150,000 plants. It is a veritable experimental laboratory, whose main goals are to search for and test new plant nursing technologies while experimenting with sculptural plant trimming. The garden space is arranged with the help of impressively-scaled plant compositions, the shapes of which are evocative of the landscapes and the natural features of Normandy. The plants are plied into different forms, such as the “waves“ of the English Channel, “sea“ spirals and whirlpools, “oyster farms“, “rock formations and arches“ of the Alabaster coast, among others. Les Jardins d’Étretat is not only an attempt to showcase the biodiversity and natural beauty of Normandy, but also an opportunity to demonstrate new methods applied in the art of landscaping.

Les Jardins d’Étretat is an open-air museum of contemporary art, which features a unique collection of art objects. The unusual combination of trimmed plants and contemporary sculptures lends the gardens their tone, as well as a striking sense of individuality.

Les Jardins d’Étretat represent the art of gardening at its best and occupies a special place in the field of contemporary art, as well as in the global community of professional garden design. The museum display consists of permanent and temporary expositions. The permanent collection of contemporary sculpture is at the architectural core of the garden, whose artistic integrity, dramaturgy and general ambience would have been lost without these sculptural highlights.

This exposition brings to focus the striking individuality of Les Jardins d’Étretat in the world of landscaping art. The temporary exhibitions concur with annual summer season launches the gardens. The primary goal of these exhibitions is to develop a social, natural and artistic milieu aimed to stimulate creativity, improve ethical values, preserve the environment and protect historical and cultural heritage. Grivko believes that the landscape surrounding a person is an extension of this person’s inner self. Therefore, he aims to keep his work restrained and limited, and to avoid excessive graphic linearity or overly bright colour palettes.

The dogmatic principle for all of his creations is defined by the position of a person in space and by the states of self- awareness they experience in it. He strives for a sense of harmony and complete visual comfort. The historical, artistic and architectural significance of Les Jardins d’Étretat lies in the application of several avant- garde principles of Neo-futurism. The garden compositions embody large-scale neo-futuristic ideas, the art of the future staying apace with its time, mirroring the present state of the cultural advancement of humanity.

Traditionally, there are five major garden styles known to exist: formal regular French garden, formal Italian garden, informal English landscape garden as well as Asian garden (e.g., Japanese) and Oriental garden (such as Persian or Mughal gardens). Through trial and error, Alexandre Grivko has successfully been experimenting with developing a new garden style, steeped exclusively in neo-futuristic ideas. The modern approach lies at the foundation of this style; the space is arranged by means of new sculpted shapes of trimmed plants. When completed, Les Jardins d’Étretat will be recorded in the history of landscape gardening as the first specimen of a unique style of garden architecture, the name of which has yet to be established.